Rush: Power From The People

But the big payoff is Moving Pictures, which peaked at Number Three barely a month after its release, aced out of the top spot only by REO Speedwagon's Hi Infidelity and Styx' Paradise Theatre. Already gold and certain to go platinum, the album has also set off a chain reaction: older albums like 2112 and the live All the World's a Stage have gone platinum in its wake. Rush has now sold more than 10 million records worldwide.

Compared to earlier Rush epics like 2112, A Farewell to Kings and Hemispheres, with their twenty-minute concept pieces and serpentine rhythm changes, both Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures are paragons of heavy-metal commerciality. Five of Moving Pictures' seven songs clock in at under five minutes; the rougher edges have been shaved off Lee's voice; and on one number, "Vital Signs," the band even takes a shot at a Police-style reggae shuffle.

"The difference," Lee explains, "is in the organization of the music We learned a lot about composition and arrangement in making Hemispheres. Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures are the result of application, of saying, 'Okay, we know we can do this and we learned all this. Now let's see if we can make a song out of it that'll really have a lot happening in it' It's not just that the songs are four minutes long so they can get on the radio. It's the quality of those four minutes.

But the real secret of Rush's success is that they simply eliminated the middlemen. When FM radio stations ignored them, the band took their cause directly to the people, touring America with a vengeance and often playing as many as 200 concerts a year.

"At our heaviest," figures Lee, "we were touring seven months of the year and recording two months. We'd have maybe a total of a month off — and never at one time. It was hard, but we felt we had to do that because we weren't getting exposure any other way. Besides, we enjoyed playing, and what better way to learn your craft — to refine what you're doing — than to do it?"

As musicians, Lee and Lifeson have done all their growing up in public They first met in ninth grade and soon became veterans of the local basement-band scene. Together with a friend of Alex', drummer John Rutsey, they cut their teeth at high-school parties and church dances with a repertoire heavy on Cream, Hendrix and Led Zeppelin covers. In the early Seventies, the drinking age in Ontario was lowered from twenty-one to eighteen, enabling Rush to hit the more lucrative bar and club circuit in and around Toronto. "That was really the point where we became professional," says Lifeson, "in the sense that we were all dedicated to doing that and only that."

Dedication, of course, was not enough to make it in Canada. "It was ridiculous," Lee grins, recalling some of the problems Rush ran into. "We played a pub' night at a local college, and they kept telling us, 'Don't play too loud, we can't hear the beer orders.'" At one gig in Oakville, Ontario, they were fired after only half a set when neighbors complained about the noise. The band's awesome volume (Lee first developed his Robert Plant-like screech simply so he could be heard over the instruments) and their heavy-metal leanings won them few friends outside the province. 'All the years we were playing bars and schools, we never left Ontario," Lee says. "We couldn't even get a club tour of western Canada. All of our prehistory took place in Ontario. We couldn't get gigs anywhere else."

They couldn't get a record deal, either. The band's manager, Ray Danniels — who got his start booking school dances for Rush when he was sixteen — released their self-titled debut album in 1974 on the group's own Moon label after it had been turned down twice by every major record company in Canada. Later that year, though, the album began getting considerable airplay in Midwest heavy-metal capitals like Cleveland and Detroit, and Mercury Records signed Rush in the U.S.

Rush's first American tour almost ended before it began when John Rutsey quit after a falling out with Lee and Lifeson. Neil Peart, another Toronto native who had previously tried his luck as a drummer in England, stepped in at the eleventh hour, and Rush hit the touring trail with the enthusiasm of kids given the run of a candy store.

"The strategy was, 'There's a gig. We'll go play it,'" says Lee. "If you look at our routing plans for those first four years, it was totally nonsensical. One time we went from Gainesville, Florida, straight up to Allentown, Pennsylvania."